Dad Vs. the Alpha
When Science Gets It Wrong
Science, as a way of knowing, has been hugely influential in the development of American Culture. A prime example is a paper from the 1940s by Rudolf Schenkel1 about wolf behavior observed at a zoo in Switzerland.
He described a fierce, competitive, hierarchical grouping with a dominant male, ready to kill or wound, at the top of the pack. This is the first telling of a story about the “Alpha Wolf”.
The story of the Alpha Wolf has failed us. It is crucial at this point in American history, World history, and human history to understand that Mother Nature is the resilience and sustainability champion. We need to understand the stories she tries to show us. Schenkel misread and misunderstood the wolf story. It was false from the beginning, but it has been incorporated into the American Culture in a way that cultivates a personally and socially dangerous omphaloskepsis that is destroying way too many young men.
Schenkel’s idea of a dominant Alpha male was picked up and expanded upon in work by L. David Mech in the late 1970s. His book2 became an important, popular starting point for the understanding of wolves and how they functioned for about 40 years.
For American wolves, the time between the 1940s and the 80s were an important forty years. In the lower 48, until the 1960s, wolves were hated, feared3, and virtually extirpated during the westward expansion.
“President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who is generally renowned for his environmental activism, declared the wolf ‘the beast of waste and desolation’ and called for its complete eradication. Wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned, tortured, and burned alive. Wolf skulls and pelts were piled high for victory photographs and to claim the lucrative bounties. Many hunters (often called “wolfers”) believed they served God and country by clearing the countryside of such vermin.”4
At some point around 1960, the wolf’s image and reputation started to change. It seems two threads weave the story. The first thread is urbanization. In 1950, about 36% of the population was rural5. By 2020, that had dropped to less than 18%6. To quote a favorite, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone? They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”7
As more people moved to the suburbs and cities, leaving Nature behind, a nostalgia for a time-that-never-was took hold. This nostalgia was manifested in “back-to-the-land” fantasies along with the counter-culture8 fascination with the Indian ethnic nations, many of whom revere, and respect the wolf. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves was hugely successful in 1990. I doubt it would have, or even could have, been made in 1950.
The second, and most important thread, starts with the primate studies of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey who opened the doors to understanding complexity and nuance in the natural environment, an understanding that took a great deal of time to develop. In the 1970s, Diane K. Boyd carried out the same kind of long-term, complex, nuanced, and networked study of wolves in their native habitats9.
“Native habitats” is the crucial point. Both Schenkel and Mech made the same error. They put organisms in unnatural settings and thought they would act naturally. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t, and they didn’t.
What Schenkel and Mech did was the equivalent of describing human behavior based on observations made on a prison yard overfilled with unsupervised, unrelated prisoners. A situation all about size, strength, threats, violence, submission, and survival will always resolve into competitive packs, be they wolf or human.
For any organism, especially a warm-blooded apex predator, energy is at a premium. It requires hard work to gain it. Wasting it is thermodynamic suicide. A dominant Alpha wolf entailing competition, fighting, wound healing, potential death, and generalized stress is a profligate energy waste. Family-structure rather than pack-hierarchy limits the waste. Competition becomes cooperation. Fighting becomes a warning snap. Wound healing is not needed, and generalized stress is reduced.
“Natural wolf packs function essentially as family units with a clear but relatively peaceful social order. ... Roles within the pack are often determined by age, experience”, and personality rather than through aggressive dominance displays. … Rather than maintaining position through aggression and dominance, the breeding pair leads primarily through experience and the natural respect accorded to parents by their offspring. …Successful wolf packs demonstrate remarkable flexibility, with leadership adapting to changing circumstances rather than adhering to rigid hierarchical structures. …When conflicts do arise, they are typically resolved through ritualized displays rather than serious fighting—posturing, growling, or showing teeth usually suffices to resolve disagreements without physical harm”.10
Do you suppose that the big, bad, dominating, aggressive “Alpha” actually spends his days wearing wolfy dad-jeans and telling dad-jokes? (They pelted down the path in the rain because they had a fur way to go.)
The problem is that the destructive Alpha myth has become an integral part of the American Culture, and in the process has been transformed in a model of toxic masculinity, that can be summarized as overly confident, aggressive, domineering, misogynistic, lacking empathy, and socio-psychologically isolated. In short, bullying.
This is the model manifest in the manosphere, a toxic section of social media purveying extreme versions of masculinity, targeting teens and insecure 20s.11,12 The manosphere has a huge audience trying to live up to a manifestly false, destructive, story that never, ever could or would exist in Nature. Any wolf pack, or social group, with one or more of this type of “Alpha” would be doomed, much, much sooner rather than later.
To survive and thrive, the stories we all, young and old, need to tell and hear are about you, me, us, and them, being part of a family.
Here’s one by Neil Diamond about welcoming extended family.
Things change and stay the same. This is today’s story. It needs to be shouted from the rooftops right now,
Thanks for being here.
2) L. David Mech, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, 1981, Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN 13: 9780816610266 To give credit where credit is due, he cancelled the book when he learned more, and has worked hard to correct the error.
3) There is a whole mythology about dangerous wolves. Wolves rarely attack people in North America without underlying reasons such as rabies, cornering, wounding, or harassing. In the late 1890s, a few people were killed during brutally cold winters. Nobody in the lower 48 has been killed since sometime before 1900. Since 1960, one person has been killed in both Canada and Alaska by wild, free-roaming wolves.
4) https://missionwolf.org/brief-history-of-wolves-in-the-wild
6) https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/rural-population
8) I admit to being an unreconstructed, unrepentant, unapologetic, hippie anthropologist focused on Ecology.
9) Diane K. Boyd, A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery. 2024, Greystone Books.
11) https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/what-is-the-manosphere-and-why-should-we-care